How I Built My Small Business

Jack Brewster - How NEWSREEL is Tackling Misinformation in Today’s News Landscape

• Season 1 • Episode 48

Share episode

Let's dive into a topic that affects all of us - how cellphones, social media, and AI are fundamentally reshaping the way we consume news and engage in politics.

Jack Brewster is the Founder and CEO of Newsreel, an app designed to make news more accessible for young people and those that are digitally exhausted. As a Fullbright scholar in Germany, he researched how young people consume news and how journalism can adapt to these changing behaviors. He is also the Enterprise Editor at NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of news sources and works to combat misinformation in media.

Before founding Newsreel, Jack was a reporter at Forbes Magazine, where he covered politics and online extremism. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, VICE, Fortune, and Newsweek. 

Jacks’ reporting has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN, and The Washington Post. 

Connect with Jack Brewster:
Jack Brewster on LinkedIn
Try Newsreel here
Newsreel on Instagram

Podcast recommendations from Jack:
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Up First
The Daily

A Balanced News Diet from Jack (Both Liberal and Conservative):
AxiosAM
The Rundown - an AI newsletter
Mainstream Conservative - The Dispatch, The National Review
Tortoise - British media publication 
Nate Silver’s substack

If you’re looking for a new news diet starting point, UpFirst gives the headlines in a succinct manner


Subscribe on Apple Podcast , Spotify or YouTube.

Let’s connect!

Subscribe to my newsletter: Time To Live: Thriving in Business and Beyond

Website: https://www.annemcginty.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annemcginty

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annemcgintyhost


Speaker 1:

Don't care about what other people think, don't care about what failure looks like I mean, we're only on this earth for 75 years and worrying about what other people think and about you know the path you're taking job wise is the quickest way to living a life that's not fulfilling.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to another episode of how I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McIntyre, your host, and today we have Jack Brewster chatting with us about how cell phones, social media and AI are fundamentally reshaping the way we consume news and engage in politics. The way we consume news and engage in politics, jack is the founder and CEO of Newsreel, an app designed to make news more accessible for young people and those that are digitally exhausted. As a Fulbright scholar in Germany, he researched how young people consume news and how journalism can adapt to these changing behaviors. He is also the enterprise editor at NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of news sources and works to combat misinformation in media.

Speaker 2:

Before founding Newsreel, jack was a reporter at Forbes magazine, where he covered politics and online extremism. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, time Magazine, vice, fortune and Newsweek. Jack's reporting has been featured in the New York Times, bloomberg, CNN and the Washington Post. You can find links to connect with Jack and Newsreel in the episode's description and newsreel in the episode's description. If you find value in today's episode, please share it with someone who might benefit and follow the show to help me reach more listeners ears. Let's get started. Thank you to our listeners for being here today. Jack, thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Speaker 2:

So let's just jump right in. What are you noticing about the news? Consumption habits in young people today.

Speaker 1:

In short, young people are tuning out. There is a lot of people who are actively avoiding the news. They're actively avoiding staying informed, finding out information on topics that are pretty crucial to being an engaged citizen. That doesn't mean that they necessarily care about it less. In fact, a lot of young people care about it more, but they find that our information ecosystem is just really overwhelming.

Speaker 2:

And what do you think is the cause of that?

Speaker 1:

One of the primary ones is just the nature of our online ecosystem and the way that young people especially, get their news.

Speaker 1:

We and I'm lumping myself in there I'm technically Gen Z, but it goes back and forth whether or not I'm Gen Z or millennial. So the case of this conversation I'm going to lump myself in there as a 28-year-old. A lot of young people are using TikTok, instagram and other social media outlets as their newspaper, as their online newsstand, and I don't want to demonize anybody for using them, and I'm not here to do that, and that's part of the reasons why I even launched a career as a journalist. But these platforms were not built for news consumption and that sounds obvious to people. But when you think about how they're being used how TikTok is being used as a search engine, how Instagram is being used as the modern version of the New York Times, that point becomes more relevant, because it's not necessarily obvious to everyone that these tools were not built at all to serve as effective vehicles for relaying current events and important information about our news cycle.

Speaker 2:

So what do you think that adults in my generation so I'm a zennial millennial I'm like at the tail end Technology was emerging when I was graduating from high school. What do you think that we misunderstand about Gen Z? What do we need to know in order to help solve this problem?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think one of the main things is that Gen Z doesn't read or they just tune out and are these like lazy creatures who are completely uninterested in anything? That's not a TikTok dance. Actually, study after study shows that this generation is one of the most engaged when it comes to our politics, and that the irony is that people of all generations are reading more than they ever have. It's just the style of reading has changed, and I don't necessarily blame Gen Z for that, and I don't think it's a function of just that young people are lazy. I think it's that, across the board, the way that we consume information has changed, and it has a lot to do with the people who built our online ecosystem. It has a lot to do with the people who built our online ecosystem, and that's who I blame for the perception that Gen Z, or any generation, is quote unquote lazy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, your generation is not the only generation that is also being inundated with so many inputs of information, coming from all directions too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So, with Newsreel, what did you understand and see as a gap in the market?

Speaker 1:

So one of the main reasons why I started it is I'm a product of legacy news. My parents met as journalists at Life Magazine on the 31st floor of the Time Life building. I'm a product of legacy news. I've worked at Forbes and other legacy news outlets, but I felt like in the last 10 to 20 years there's been a slow and now rapid movement of legacy news outlets to sort of try and beat social media at its own game. And again, I don't blame legacy news outlets for doing that. I think that they've been struggling and their business model has been upended by the internet and they're looking to sort of see how can we survive, but they've been trying to beat social media at its own game. What I mean by that is that they have rushed to fill the gap that they think is in the market where they can pump out news, and the way to earn revenue in the digital age is by feeding the Google, instagram, tiktok, facebook algorithms, and that has meant that they are producing more and more articles. Sometimes these articles are more sensationalized and they've had to sort of create a new kind of news organization that maximizes content over really trying to inform their readers. And I'm really generalizing here. I really hate when people lump the media in as one major category or, like people say, the media is biased, like well, it's like. What is the media the media is? You could argue that you know anyone with a laptop and an internet connection that's on social media is a journalist. They are the media. But what I'm saying here, as I'm generalizing, is that I feel like media outlets have really rushed to fill what they feel like is a void. What I have tried to do with Newsreel is create a new kind of news company that is entirely focused on trying to answer the problem that people have when it comes to reading information online, trying to create active rather than passive forms of news consumption, trying to create a news company that's built for the modern attention span, that's built for the modern digital lifestyle, and I think it's unique in the way that we're trying to deliver news and I hope that it will help people who feel just completely overwhelmed by the chaos of our digital world.

Speaker 1:

Now, the way that we read on our phones and on our laptops is profoundly different than reading a book or opening a physical newspaper. You can look at study after study, but there is a distinct difference between how people consume online texts versus physical texts, and that creates a number of problems when it comes to news consumption. Because why are people reading the news? They want to retain that information, they want to feel smarter, they want to have more productive conversations, but these platforms social media and our phones in general make it so damn hard, and that's what I mean by passive. It's basically our phones and the apps that are on them have turned us into passive browsers, surfers, right.

Speaker 1:

Think about all the words that we use. We don't read the internet, we surf the internet, right? Yeah, and there's a reason why we have picked those terms. It's because we're skinning and the phones have turned us into basically a generation of multitaskers. So, when it comes to a lot of tasks like ordering DoorDashash, while you're texting your spouse about when you're going to come home and you're getting a FaceTime from your daughter or son about you know what time they need to be picked up. That's wonderful. It's wonderful to have that tool. It's wonderful to have this amazing multitasking tool. When it comes to reading news and learning about complex information, these tools don't rise to the occasion, so I think we need to create a profoundly different kind of news app that delivers the news in a profoundly different way. To answer that problem of trying to take us back to more active, more deliberate news consumption rather than just browsing and multitasking.

Speaker 2:

More deliberate news consumption rather than just browsing and multitasking, and given that your Newsreel app is not yet available to the general public, can you give us any sneak peeks as to what is going to make it combat that digital exhaustion that you're mentioning?

Speaker 1:

and make it more engaging. Yeah, so for the first thing, we're using learning science and all the features that we're developing in our app. So what do I mean by that? I mean, you know, we're trying to make news more visual. We're trying to use the tricks that people have seen on other learning devices, like Duolingo, if anyone wants to use that for language. These are all tried and true ways that scientists have found that people have used in schools to keep people engaged, to keep news super digestible on your screen so you only see a little bit amount of text at a time.

Speaker 1:

The specific features that we're designing the first thing is basically what we call an interactive news briefing. If anyone's used Axios has seen their digestible newsletters or seen any of the other kind of bulleted, you know very brief newsletters out there. This is like that on steroids. So we have taken that concept of sort of brevity and taken it a whole step further. We're trying to make a daily news experience that keeps you focused, keeps you engaged, tests you on that information through quizzes, presents information visually through graphics, through video, fills up the whole screen with text. I know that sounds so simple, but people, especially young people, see an article on the New York Times and they see if there's 150, 200 words on a screen and they click out so freaking fast. So we've really tried to almost what we say kill the article on newsreel.

Speaker 1:

So the other thing is timelines. We've created a database of timelines on different news topics and the reason why that works, or why we think that works when it comes to this problem, is that people are not reading the news every day. They don't understand where they're meeting a news story. When they encounter it on the New York Times or the Washington Post or God forbid, a TikTok feed, they don't get where they are in the story progression and they go to Google and they type in what's the last major event that happened when it comes to Kamala Harris and immigration, and up will come five billion articles, a Wikipedia page, but nothing that grounds them, nothing that makes them feel like their hand is being held, like they have a expert in the room that's talking to them. That's what timelines are trying to sort of.

Speaker 1:

Mimic is that we can hold your hand and show you over time, extremely quickly, the progression of a story. So think about how important this could be when it comes to Trump's false claims about the election right If you have a friend who says Trump hasn't been talking about voter fraud this election and you can come to Newsreel and say we have a timeline on that and here's five times in the last four months that he's said that. But if you go to Google right now, you have to start searching and searching and searching for an article. It just doesn't work. It's not built for that again. So those are the two main features that we're going to start with.

Speaker 1:

So an interactive news briefing, a database of timelines with learning science helping inform both of them, and we'll expand from there.

Speaker 2:

And then, how are you hoping to establish trust with your readers, and also, how are you planning to prevent bias?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I always get this question To answer the second part first. First of all, there are many different kinds of bias and I believe what kind of bias you're talking about is partisan bias. But there are many different kinds and the journalists, the media, people are influenced by every single one of them Confirmation bias, negativity bias which I think is the most important thing when it comes to the media. Across all demographics, across all partisan lanes, the media has a bias towards negativity, towards more negative stories. But I believe you're probably mentioning partisan bias and one of the reasons why I think people think that this is happening. I do believe that there is a problem with it in the media overall. I'm not going to say what particular side is worse, but I do think it's something that plagues all humans and the reason why I think people perceive it as getting worse is that, again, it goes back to what I was talking about at the beginning of this interview.

Speaker 1:

A lot of media outlets have had to try and beat social media outlets at their own game, and that means that they've had to play the sort of dark rules of the internet, which means being sensational, trying to overstate things and use loaded language and come across as this being a catastrophe or trying to set things up as being a clash between two sides. That's because that's what sells on the internet, even more so than newspapers or tabloids. Even Media really has felt like it's had to play that game, and one of the origin stories of Newsreel is trying to be the antithesis of that trying to present a slower news cycle, trying to present a refuge from the chaos of breaking news on the internet and provide a place where the news cycle moves a little bit slower, where we don't care necessarily about being first, where we're trying to sort of create a Swiss army night for people who want to break from the chaos of social media. And when people ask me oh, who's your customer when it comes to young people? Well, it's really anyone who feels like they are tired of social media. And when people ask me oh, who's your customer when it comes to young people? Well, it's really anyone who feels like they are tired of social media, tired of breaking news, and want to break.

Speaker 1:

We're not saying we're going to replace social media. We're not saying we're going to replace the New York Times. This is for people who want to break. So I think that is our biggest buffer when it comes to bias, but obviously also we're going to have. You know, I'm a journalist who's worked covering misinformation. I understand how the death of truth, as people call it, is really the death of nuance, and when people get worried about bias they're often really worried about the death of nuance, that people don't feel like they get the full picture anymore and I'm hoping that we could provide that in the different ways that we're delivering the news.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there is a lot of noise out there and it's a lot to sift through and figure out what is real and what is not.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

You had mentioned how a lot of these media outlets are using sensational language and negativity bias. Would you also say that it has impacted the quality of the journalism?

Speaker 1:

In some ways? Yes, absolutely, you know. I mean it's hard again to sort of generalize this and it's hard to quantify it, and researchers, you know, have tried to. But I think people perceive it as getting worse because we're encountering it so much more, we're seeing news so much more, it's moving so much faster too as well. So it's created more opportunities for mistakes, it's created more opportunities for tribalism.

Speaker 1:

As I said, these are kind of the dark rules of the internet, and I don't necessarily blame news outlets some facing bankruptcy or declining revenues to play the game. That's true. Yeah, there's not necessarily an easy solution. So how do you feel about AI in all of this? It gives people the power of thousands of writers at their disposal, almost democratizing news, or the troll farm, if you're thinking about sort of malicious ways that it can be weaponized.

Speaker 1:

But when it comes to news avoidance and this topic that one of the problems that Newsreel is trying to answer we're trying to solve news overload, news exhaustion, and what is the link between AI and news exhaustion? It seems pretty simple to me. It's just another way that there's going to be even more content produced of all kinds over the coming years. And when it comes to news avoidance. When it comes to news exhaustion, that's, I think, where AI plays a big role. It is a force multiplier. It gives everyone and anyone the power to produce content as much as they want, at whatever scale they want.

Speaker 1:

I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year about how easy it is for anyone to go to a freelance marketplace. Now pay a developer like 80 bucks to make your own content farm, make your own website that just pumps out low quality articles for ad dollars, and I can't tell you how scary that is. I mean, it means that there's going to be an explosion of these websites that are just going to flutter Facebook feeds, flutter TikTok feeds, flutter Instagram feeds with low quality content, because that's another way to make money.

Speaker 1:

It's another way to make passive income.

Speaker 2:

And what do you think platforms can do to reverse this trend, or can they not? Do you think this will just happen, no matter what?

Speaker 1:

It's tough when it comes to when you say I'm going to open a marketplace for user generated content. They could crack down on AI generated content and put policies in place that bars the posting that or bars spam. A lot of social media outlets already do that, but it's another thing to detect it right. I mean, we don't have really effective detection tools yet, so right now we're kind of at a loss. You know, google has been dealing with this problem a lot because the AI generated websites have been climbing up in their rankings and that's really created a problem when it comes to search, because people are, you know, looking for content A lot of times written by humans. They don't want to, you know, have secondhand AI generated content or AI generated fluff, and so Google has really been faced with this problem and has been trying to downrank or deprioritize AI generated news websites.

Speaker 2:

It's kind of frightening, if you think about it, just how quickly you're saying that they are climbing. So I don't know if these sites are using the old school SEO in order to climb. Is there something going on in the background that we don't know about? How they're able to get on the front page?

Speaker 1:

They're really effective tools at automating SEO, so you can automate the whole process start to finish. You can set up a website and have it completely run by bots and by AI using ChatGPT's API from start to finish. So humans sometimes can't keep up and it makes sense that these websites would be rising the rankings because search engine algorithms that work for Google don't necessarily know the difference yet between AI-generated content and human-created content, or they're trying to, but they haven't perfected it yet. So that's created a world where this AI-, ai generated content is mixed in with it.

Speaker 1:

And I look, I don't have a problem with AI. I don't have a problem, necessarily, even with journalists using AI. What I do have a problem with is when it's being used deceptively, when people are not sure what's produced by AI, what's produced by humans, or when human generated content is being ripped off by AI, you know, scrambled and rewritten and then published on another site, and that's been happening a lot. So it's a new frontier and it just goes back to my original point. Like we've set up, we have made our bed when it comes to this. Why is AI being used? Because it's a new way to make money. We've created all these incentives for people to do these kinds of things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I've been doing a lot of research on AI and it's it's. The future has so many different potentials we don't really know. Will it be used for good? Will it be used for bad? What do you see as the future of journalism Like? Do you think that we can ever get back to a deeper, more meaningful news engagement?

Speaker 1:

Oh, tough question. Wow. In some ways, I think AI creates new opportunities for journalists and for news. You know, I do think that journalists could play a beneficial role when it comes to helping people more effectively find the information that they're looking for. I mean, one of the tools now being, if you go to LinkedIn, that people are looking for is prompt engineering, which is just literally knowing what kinds of queries to put into large language models like ChatGPT. And what are journalists? What's one thing that journalists are good at, it's asking questions and knowing what to search for. So that's one opportunity I think journalists can be helping people.

Speaker 1:

That's a new kind of role for journalists that I don't necessarily think they're thinking of, and I do think AI will help a lot of people who want to automate some benign tasks so they can focus on deeper things. That's what every sort of innovation, that's what they say. I'm skeptical a little bit, but I do think the next frontier of journalism is going to have to be some kind of movement back towards a slower news cycle, because humans are never going to be able to beat AI at its own game, and that is producing content at the blink of an eye. And the sooner the journalists accept that. The sooner the journalists realize that their role is going to need to change, I think that the sooner that we'll come to a better new place for news, for journalists and for just consumers who want to have a place to go when it comes to high quality information.

Speaker 2:

Do you think that AI will impact the fact checking that happens in the future?

Speaker 1:

On what end? Do you mean on producing misinformation, or on the other side?

Speaker 2:

Well, both on producing but also identifying.

Speaker 1:

I think it could help with identifying false narratives as they emerge more quickly. I mean, you know, even as a misinformation researcher myself, like I've used tools that have artificial intelligence embedded in them to try and spot false narratives more quickly. The problem is just that, like we can only move so quickly, and I feel like just as we create new tools of identifying false narratives and new ways that people are spreading misinformation, bad actors find another way to sort of circumvent those tools or find a new way to produce misinformation that's not as easily detectable. And the problem is, too, that the platforms themselves are really making it hard for researchers when it comes to misinformation. You know, meta just closed down one of their tools called CrowdTangle, which was one of the only ways that journalists could effectively search Facebook and search Instagram for false narratives. So that's just one of the many ways that platforms are sort of working against journalists when it comes to identifying misinformation that's trending on the platforms.

Speaker 2:

Wow. So with the election coming up really shortly here, how do you feel that this election news cycle has been?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a good question. So I think a lot of the threats around AI haven't materialized in the way that I think researchers thought. When it comes to misinformation, I think a lot of journalists were warning about deepfakes and misinformation spreading that way. Instead, it's been a lot of memes created by AI to bolster false narratives, almost like AI has allowed for the rapid creation of misleading political cartoons. I guess you could say, when you think back to the Haitian migrants false claim about, you know Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield Ohio, there wasn't deep fakes. Or you know realistic AI generated images being created which you would think would be the really you know good use case for that right. I mean, if you were a bad actor and wanted to sort of push that false narrative out, you would prompt Midjourney or Chachi PT's Dolly to create a realistic looking image of a dog being eaten by a migrant. But that didn't really happen. Instead, it was like these political cartoons of Trump you know, holding pets of Trump, petting cats implying that he was saving them, petting cats implying that he was saving them, and of course, there's no basis for the claim in the first place. But you see how AI is just being used in a sort of novel way that people didn't really think about, because that narrative took off on TikTok and Instagram everywhere. It's probably the most pervasive false claim that emerged from this cycle. You know, other things that I think have really been a dominant part of this news cycle, especially when it comes to media literacy, is just the pervasiveness of false claims about voting and immigrants. You know we've seen that time and time and time again and I think Trump and others have been laying the groundwork to question the legitimacy of the results again. So I think that's also been a dominant narrative. And also another point, media literacy. When it comes to, you know, talking back to Newsreel and kind of those ideas that I feel bad for readers in the sense that people are using TikTok and X and Instagram for news more than ever before. You know that has truly become the dominant source of news and we know less and less and less and less and less about the sources where we're getting our news and information.

Speaker 1:

You know, if you had come to me 20 years ago and said, Jack, in 20 years the modern newsstand will be like you going to a newsstand on the side of the street and you point to a newspaper and you say who runs that newspaper? And the guy behind says I don't know. And you say do you know anything about that newspaper? And the guy says no, it's just some anonymous person, some anonymous dude. I have no idea. You would be like that's nuts and that is what our modern newspaper is. If you go to X now, the blue check doesn't even mean anything. Like we don't know anything about a lot of these people that are feeding us news and information. I mean, one of the most popular accounts that Elon Musk interacts with is called Cat Turd. It's this anonymous, you know person who goes by the name Cat Turd. I mean it is ridiculous, but that's the water world where we live in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and, like you know, tiktoks don't know better, I mean. So that's really what I feel for when it comes to people is that you know, we're using these tools more and more and more because they're accessible and they move quickly and that's all we have, but they're really, really bad when it comes to giving people high quality news and information.

Speaker 2:

So for anybody that is listening in, who reads their news online and they scroll maybe they get it from Reddit or maybe they're on BBC, CNN. I mean, they just kind of peruse their normal sites. What advice do you have for them so that they know whether or not what they're reading is actually valid?

Speaker 1:

Other than newsreel. I encourage everyone to check it out and to subscribe to it. That's my shameless pitch, because it will be rolling out over the coming weeks and months. But the other major piece of advice I would give is truly, really basic. It's something that applies to people in other parts of their life, which is slow down and have a balance and I can't tell you how many times I've told this to people, and people are like that's it, like that's all you got. You work in this, and that's the most complicated thing you can say. And I'm like yeah, truly, it's not that hard, it's not that difficult to be a better news consumer. I mean, yes, like I've been saying that these platforms have made it very hard for us, but there are small things that people can still do, and it's really the only things people can do, which is slow down and have a good news diet. Have a balance of sources that you're looking at. If you're watching CNN and MSNBC exclusively or Fox News exclusively, that creates a problem. You need to have a balanced news diet. You need to be listening to podcasts, you need to be reading newspapers, not even getting into the partisan lean of any of those outlets. Right, it's truly can be just as simple as that. Find podcasts that present the news in a different way. There's so many out there that present news slowly, that unpack the nuance of events Right. You know, I listen to one called Plain English by this journalist at the Atlantic named Derek Thompson. That's just mine. He's very, very good at unpacking the nuance of complex issues like the Israel Hamas war, for instance. So that's my way. There's tons of substacks, too, where people dive into issues really specifically very niche topics. Obviously, it's sometimes hard to know what's credible and what's not, but if you have a balanced news diet, if you're looking at newsletters, podcasts, tv newspapers, I think you will create somewhat of a buffer between you and the chaos of the digital age. So that's the first thing.

Speaker 1:

Second, try and find out who the people are that are giving you news on social media. I can't tell you how many of my friends even have come to me and said did you see so-and-so, said this about Trump or said this about Harris? I'm like where did you see that? I don't know what was the account that you saw, that I don't know what was the platform that you saw that I don't know. And I mean like that is like when you're in English class or history class and you're writing a paper or you're answering a question, the first thing the professor asks is like where did you get that?

Speaker 1:

Cite your sources. And people are just terrible about that when it comes to news. But I just really, really encourage everyone to sort of know who are the 500 people they are that they're following. I mean, even if it's just someone who is a lifestyle influencer, you know, google them. Have they come out in strong support of Donald Trump and cryptocurrency? You know, these are just basic facts that people should know about the sources where they're getting news, but I don't think a lot of people do. They don't, they don't look, they don't do that. One extra step.

Speaker 2:

So you'd mentioned plain English, I think. Can you tell us about any other podcasts that you listen to that you have found to be reputable?

Speaker 1:

Yes, no, I always get this question and I always have been meaning okay, I need to have a list ready because I know sort of what I listen to on the reg. I listen to Up First and the Daily almost every single day and I listen to Plain English a lot. I read a lot of different substacks. Right now I've been reading Nate Silver's substack a lot, not because I think he has the best predictions for the 2024 election, but just because it's really interesting the way he goes into all the details about polling and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

I read Axios every morning, axios AM. I read something called the Rundown, which is an AI newsletter. What else? I read some mainstream conservative publications like the Dispatch and some things from the National Review. I read something called Tortoise. That's a British media publication. That whole idea is slow news. It's kind of an interesting concept and they present like a lot of data stories, things like that. So you know it's all across the board. I'm a news junkie but when it comes to people who want sort of a starting point, up First gives the headlines pretty succinctly and it's on my Amazon Alexa and I just listen to it every morning as sort of like a really gentle wake up.

Speaker 2:

It's really good. I'm going to write all of those down and I'm going to check them out. So back to Newsreel a little bit. What have been the biggest challenges that you've faced? Creating it, building your team and getting it to the point where you are right now?

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of it's consistency. I've had this idea for a long, long time and it's being diligent enough to say look, I don't necessarily know where this is going, and I'm okay with that chaos and I'm okay with that uncertainty. Being consistent with that and not turning away from that has been really, really hard. Sometimes it's really, really hard to start a startup, and it's even harder to start a startup that's in journalism or news, just because of where the industry is. So I think that's been the biggest thing. I think the biggest obstacle to that is really just yourself. I mean, I think a lot of people are just afraid of their own success. They're afraid of having to get to that point where they put something in front of people that they've worked on a ton and they're not sure whether people will like it or hate it. And even if they do like it, they're worried about what's going to follow from that. Will they have to keep one-upping themselves? And that's been, I think, the biggest thing.

Speaker 1:

It's just like myself, just fighting against my own concerns and anxieties and imposter syndrome and, as a journalist, we're terrible bullshit artists and I think sometimes startup founders like have to BS a little bit and to sort of get by the BS to themselves and BS to like others about their quote unquote plan, and I'm really really bad at that. I'm just really bad at that. I mean I'm raised by journalists. My dad is a journalist, my mom used to be a journalist. Now she's a therapist, which means it's even harder to BS. So I've really made it hard for myself and that's, I think, been the biggest thing. It's just like kind of fighting against myself.

Speaker 2:

How many journalists are working with you on this?

Speaker 1:

About four. Right now. It's a small team. It's a small team of about 10 to 12 people. A lot of people are doing this on the side, part time, a lot of people have other jobs, and it's kind of like this has been our passion. You know, we're trying to get this off the ground. Some will come from legacy media, some not, and we're all sort of working to this one goal of trying to create a new kind of news outlet for people goal of trying to create a new kind of news outlet for people, and what do you need in order for you to see your business thrive?

Speaker 2:

What are you?

Speaker 1:

hoping for, I think, for there to be a clear and consistent customer base, like I think. Right now. I have an idea, a hypothesis about who those people are, but I can't tell you how many people come to me and say that are older than quote unquote young people I don't even necessarily always know what that means and they say I would use this, you know, or have you thought about?

Speaker 1:

you know, I would use this as a business or I would use this as an AI company, and I think you know that's really great opportunity wise, but also creates a set of problems, right, because it's harder for me as a founder to sort of know what to prioritize. So I think success for me will come when it's very, very clear what that prioritization should be, you know, and what the North Star, so to speak, should be.

Speaker 2:

And obviously it's a business, so it needs to be profitable. How do you plan on monetizing? Is this going to be a subscription fee? Are you going to pay to download the app? Will you get sponsors? Will you have paywalls adwalls that people need to watch?

Speaker 1:

In the beginning it's going to be free and eventually we'll transition to like a freemium model, you know, like Duolingo or a lot of other apps, where there will be some part that's free and then some that's behind the paywall. More premium features, like probably some of the timelines and other tools that we're developing, will be behind a paywall. You know we're also looking at business subscriptions as well. We've been thinking about, you know, what are the applications for something like our timelines? When it comes to artificial intelligence, how could that help AI companies who are trying to better source information, and those models don't necessarily understand context and time. So those are kind of the two main applications that we're looking at right now A freemium model for consumers, but also licensing some of our data for businesses and AI companies.

Speaker 2:

And maybe you don't have this information or you don't want to disclose it, and that's totally fine, but do you have an idea of how many freemium users you would need in order for your business to keep going?

Speaker 1:

We're shooting, I think, for 100,000 freemium, meaning converting some of those to premium subscribers. But our goal kind of is 100,000 people, and you know we've gotten about 10,000 waitlist subscribers in just a few months, so there's definitely an interest out there. But our first sort of big North Star goal is 100,000. And I think we'll, you know, just keep on going from there.

Speaker 2:

Well, and, as you were saying, you're testing at Colgate and I feel like universities are a very great target for you.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I hope so. I hope and I hope that they, you know, get where we are. You know we're not trying to compete with the Times, the Washington Post, in terms of the quality or breadth of our content. You know, I think our content will be extremely high quality. But we're a different kind of news company. We're trying to fill a very specific need.

Speaker 2:

We're a different kind of news company. We're trying to fill a very specific need. Once it's available to others outside of Colgate, I'm really looking forward to checking it out myself.

Speaker 1:

Oh, thank you. Yes, and I hope your listeners too will as well.

Speaker 2:

Yes. So just a final question here If you could go back and talk with yourself, your younger self, what life wisdom would you give yourself?

Speaker 1:

Don't care about what people think, don't care about what failure looks like. I mean, we're only on this earth for 75 years, and worrying about what other people think and about the path you're taking job-wise is the quickest way to living a life that's not fulfilling. So I would tell myself to just be more accepting of failure and messiness and like that. It's just okay to be messy, it's okay to look stupid, it's okay to fail, and I think I knew that in principle and I think a lot of people do, and they tell themselves that it's another thing to really like, actually do that and to put yourself out there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it's one of those things that becomes a little bit more easy with age. I've got a teenager and so I know. If you tell my teenager not to care what other people think or about winning the game, he's like what are you talking about? But yes, as we get older, though, you really can separate and say it doesn't matter, it's you just gotta be true to you.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and that's why you know your kids will mercilessly tease you Exactly Well, jack, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and to chat with us. No, it's been so much fun. It's been so much fun. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate it. Today's key takeaways Gen Z is turning to TikTok for news, a platform that was never designed for delivering real news. Yet studies show that Gen Z cares deeply about what is happening in the world. Legacy news outlets have adapted to compete with social media platforms by sensationalizing content, using loaded language and fueling division, all because that's what sells online. This is important to know and to keep in mind. Our understanding of the news is shaped by confirmation bias, negativity bias and partisan bias. It's something to be mindful of when consuming content. Newsreel is tackling this issue by avoiding sensationalism and delivering a full, balanced picture, engaging and concise, without the pressure of breaking news. You can check them out at newsreelco or follow the link in the show notes. As readers remember, news outlets are businesses that need to make money. Knowing this allows you to approach your news consumption more objectively. Journalism is evolving. If you're in this field, one way to stay ahead is by diving into prompt engineering, a skill that will become increasingly important. Social media platforms have become the dominant source of news. We, as readers, know less and less about the sources of where we are getting our news and information. Where we are getting our news and information. Be aware of your news source. If you want high quality news and information, slow down and make sure you have a balanced news diet.

Speaker 2:

When starting a new business, uncertainty and chaos are part of the process. Stay diligent and consistent. Often the biggest obstacle in launching a business is yourself. It's normal to feel vulnerable when putting your ideas out into the world. You may face imposter syndrome as you climb and you'll have to continue fighting that part of you that tries to hold you back.

Speaker 2:

If you haven't listened to my episode with Rachel Platten, her advice on facing your inner critic as a multi-platinum artist is valuable for anyone in a creative space. As you find success, you may find that the bar continues to move higher. Be conscious of this and make sure you aren't just one-upping yourself as an instinctive reaction. Think about what you want and why. And, lastly, don't waste time worrying about what others think and be okay with failure and messiness being a part of the process. Most of us know this, but it bears repeating because it's easier said than done. You have one life and that average lifespan is about 75 years. Don't let fear of judgment lead you to a life you regret. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Anne McGinty

Host